I spent 16 hours on planes yesterday, far too many hours in one day if you ask me. Here are some observations from my travel:

1. Italian pilots fly like taxi drivers. The pilot drove down the tarmac like a crazy man... and then he almost forgot to turn onto the runway. He had to practically turn the plane around to get lined up. Great... that makes me feel real confident. Then in the air, he banks hard this way, he banks hard that way, he gets permission to land and it's petal to the metal and point the nose straight down. Whoa!

2. People think I'm Italian, Turkish, German, English, American, Canadian, Swiss, Czech, basically everything... except Japanese. No wonder I had issues growing up. I thought I blended in pretty inconspicuously with the Japanese people.

3. Airplane food has improved a lot in the last 10 years. But Alitlia's food is totally gross. Always choose the meal that is native to the airline your flying with (but that didn't matter with Alitalia-- which is the big Italian airline by the way).

4. Never have a cold when you fly unless you want your eyeballs to pop out of your head and needles to repeatedly stab your forehead during descent.

5. Watching cartoon Disney movies on long flights is a good idea.

6. Say "please" and "thank you" to grumpy flight attendants especially.

7. I recommend flying at least once with a bunch of Japanese tourist. It's interesting to watch their collective insecurity heighten as they get farther from home, so much so that they end up in those tightly waded groups you see mobbing their way down streets to big tourist attractions.


I'm back in Turkey, hanging out with Joyce again. I have another two weeks of travel before I head back to the US. Turkey is so much more similar to western culture, what I'd call normal American culture, than Japan. It's weird for me to think that I grew up in Japan and that Japan, it's culture, language and customs is so normal in a way. And yet it's so, so different. It would have been so much easier moving to the States from a European culture... still hard in ways, but over all easier. MK's from Asia have to be made out of tough stuff.